I guarantee they weren't thinking about Facebook and Twitter.
At 2100, on 29 October 1969, engineers 400 miles apart at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) prepared to send data between the first nodes of what was then known as Arpanet.It got the name because it was commissioned by the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa).
The fledgling network was to be tested by Charley Kline attempting to remotely log in to a Scientific Data Systems computer that resided at SRI.
Kline typed an "L" and then asked his colleague Bill Duvall at SRI via a telephone headset if the letter had arrived.
It had.
Kline typed an "O". Duvall said that arrived too.
Kline typed a "G". Duvall could only report that the system had crashed.
The first crash -- and unix hadn't even been invented yet! (Well, Thompson and Ritchie were muttering unspeakable incantations under their breath, e.g., "Awk grep bash chmod fsck sed", but what we know as "unix" wouldn't truly arrive for another year or so.)
Here's to ya, guys. If it weren't for the Internet, I'd probably be a history professor today.
